Archive for March, 2014

I have several privacy measures on my FireFox. These include but are not limited to Adblock Plus, Adblock Plus Pop-Up Addon, BetterPrivacy, Disconnect, DoNotTrackMe,Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus, Ghostery, Hide My Ass Proxy Extension, HideTab, HTTPS-Everywhere, NoScript, and Priv3. Recently I downloaded the Tor bundle and poked around the “deep web”. More direct, not that flashy. They actually have a version of Twitter. S’weird.Most of my friends have resigned to get a VPN. VyperVPN, WiTopia, Private Internet Acess, proXPN, TorVPN, TorGuard, etc. Or you could “roll your own” VPN with various DIY projects from Raspberry PI. All good stuff if you are a technologist like myself. Average cost is $50/month.

Incorrectly called Social Engineering and the WTESTEHTMB theory, or what I call the Guilded Cage theory, is the next step to privacy, but only as a buffer. Over a one month period I applied to 142 job openings. The most I applied, an increasing number of prospective employers would ask me to login with or voluntarily submit my social media information. Now with the theory you create the perception of character, integrity and the “vanilla” appearance all employers are looking for in someone. Do not mention politics or religion. Post benign pictures of you, friends and family. Complete charity work every month or on a constant basis. Twitter, Facebook [when the tweens jumped ship there was almost no mention of where they would go], FourSquare, Linkedin, WordPress, and whatever other mainstream social media are in the press are the false walls presented to assuage the fears of employers. Oh, and belong to groups related to professional and non-controversial interests.

Alternatives to being on social media are people who use only their first and middle names or a pseudonym, who then friend away indiscriminately, post whatever they want and drink. Gasp. There are also things like Diaspora, social network platform. Disqus is emerging and interesting.

This was done in the name of research. Reading articles on how to disappear from the internet. People seem to miss the obvious -unplug it and walk away. Technology seems to be a lot like religion to most. I want to believe what I want and how I want. Any intrusion or inconvenience is not tolerated. Yet it comes with inherent risks and mitigating those isn’t a bad thing. But the acceptance of taking on the responsibility of being a part of it should be.

In other research, downloaded iPadian because I wanted to test beta versions of apps from BetaWorks. Unfortunately it didn’t work. Every time I tried to download the app and run it, the software would flashback to the previous screen before I actually clicked on everything. On to the next.